Connected with this variation in name is the reversal in the relation between Paul and Barnabas. Previously Barnabas has been given the priority; but immediately after the incident at Paphos the missionaries are designated as "Paul and his company," Acts 13:13, and thereafter when the two are mentioned together, Paul, except at Acts 14:12,14; 15:12,25, appears first. In the presence of the Roman proconsul, Paul's Roman citizenship perhaps caused him to take the lead; and then inherent superiority made his leadership permanent.
The reasons for John Mark's return from Perga to Jerusalem can only be surmised. Perhaps he was simply unwilling, for some reason sufficient to him but insufficient to Paul, to undertake the hardships of the journey into the interior. Certainly it was an adventurous journey. Paul was not always an easy man to follow.
The severity of Paul's judgment of Mark was not necessarily so great as has sometimes been supposed. One purpose of the second journey was to revisit the churches of the first journey. Acts 15:36. Whether for good or for bad reasons, Mark, as a matter of fact, had not been with the missionaries on a large part of that first journey, and was, therefore, unknown to many of the churches. For this reason, perhaps as much as on account of moral objections, Paul considered Mark an unsuitable helper. In his later epistles Paul speaks of Mark in the most cordial way. Col. 4:10; Philem. 24; II Tim. 4:11. In the last passage, he even says that Mark was useful to him for ministering--exactly what he had not been at the beginning of the second missionary journey.
It is evident from II Cor. 11:23-27 that Luke has recorded only a small fraction of the hardships which Paul endured as a missionary of the cross. The tendency to lay exaggerated stress upon martyrdom and suffering, which runs riot in the later legends of the saints, is in The Acts conspicuous by its absence. Of the trials which are vouched for by the unimpeachable testimony of Paul himself, only a few may be identified in the Lucan narrative. It is natural, however, to suppose that some of the "perils of rivers" and "perils of robbers" were encountered on the journey through the defiles of the Taurus mountains from Perga to Pisidian Antioch, and the one stoning which Paul mentions is clearly to be identified with the adventure at Lystra. In II Tim. 3:11 Paul mentions the persecutions at Antioch, Iconium and Lystra.